WordPress – Estimated Reading Time

I have a theme coming out soon that displays the ‘estimated reading time’ for each blog post on the homepage.

The theme is inspired by the new blogging service Medium – but I first saw the idea mentioned on Brian Crays blog. I thought it was a really nice thing to add – and the idea that people are more likely to read an article when they know how long it is was quite appealing (in fact I am now wondering if I should add it on this site as well).

Anyway – the code was quite simple – so I turned it into an easily reusable function, as seen below.

All the code does is calculate the number of words in the article, and then assign a number of seconds per word. It’s very simple but gives quite nice results.

Simple but effective, I would think. Remember seeing this feature on certain news sites sometime ago but had discontinued. Wonder if there’s a way to get this info on Google search listing info (just like the star buttons). For example, against a search result if it has a 5 star along with a reasonable reading of say 3 minutes, the CTR might just increase.